Bodyline Jardine and Masculinity

5
PAT R I C K F. M C DE VIT T
Bodyline, Jardine and masculinity
Douglas Robert Jardine was born to Scottish parents in the exclusive Malabar
Hill section of Bombay in October 1900. In retrospect, his birth came argu-
ably at the absolute apex of the British Empire. Bloemfontein, Johannesburg
and Pretoria had all recently been captured, and the war in South Africa was
(erroneously) thought to be won. The aged Queen still sat comfortably on
her throne and oversaw an empire upon which the sun famously never set.
The viceregality of Lord Curzon was less than a year old and gave no sign of
diminishing prospects for the Raj. Even far off in the Antipodes, the upcom-
ing federation of the six colonies into the Commonwealth of Australia on
the first day of the new century seemed to be more a culmination of the
promise of empire than a harbinger of its dissolution. In short, Malcolm
and Allison Jardine welcomed their only son into a predictable, stable world
in which any person in their position could feel confident about the future,
secure in the knowledge that British values had shown themselves to be the
basis for civilisation as proven by a great empire. In keeping with the trad-
ition of the time, young Douglas was sent back to Britain at the age of nine
to be educated. He attended Horris Hill Preparatory School and Winchester
before going up to Oxford in 1919, where his cricketing prowess outshone
his academic performance. Although he quickly earned his blue as a fresh-
man, he finished with only a fourth-class degree in modern history. Upon
graduation, Jardine supported himself as a bank clerk while playing as an
amateur for Surrey and later England. He topped the first-class batting aver-
ages table in 1927 and 1928. Jardine was named ‘Cricketer of the Year’ in
1928 by Wisden, which declared: ‘Nobody plays with a straighter bat; few
hit harder in defence whether in a forward or a backward stroke, and not
often does he lift the ball. As with all really sound batsmen, fast bowling
possesses no terrors for him.’1
In a biography entitled Douglas Jardine: Spartan Cricketer, Christopher
Douglas described him as ‘the epitome of the old-fashioned amateur’.2
This, I believe, is the crux of the matter when it comes to explaining and
70
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understanding Jardine and his role in Bodyline. In 1932/33, Jardine’s vision

of cricket and sportsmanship was firmly rooted in the past. He learned his
cricket from his father, a distinguished university and county cricketer, and
from H. S. Altham, who was renowned as a cricketer, schoolmaster and
cricket historian. High Victorians approached cricket as a deadly serious
affair, success at which depended on both mental and physical endurance.
Indeed, Wisden’s praise of Jardine’s ‘mental gifts for cricket’, which Jardine
‘possesse[d] in abundance’, rivalled its praise of his actual batting.3 For
Jardine, leg-theory bowling was simply an adaptation of previous tactics for
the purpose of exploiting Don Bradman’s admittedly limited weaknesses.
He expected that this would present a supreme test of a batsman’s physical
courage and skill and mental fortitude, as Test bowling rightfully should.
What he clearly did not expect was the vehemence of Australian oppos-
ition which, as it transpired, only caused him to stand his ground ever more
firmly. The British Empire was not built by Britons who backed down when
challenged but, to paraphrase Kipling, by men who kept their heads while
others lost theirs.
Of course, the Australians also saw themselves as defending the long trad-
ition of cricket by demanding fair play and by not abandoning the match
even though Bodyline bowling put them at risk of serious injury. Australian
bowler Bill O’Reilly described Australian captain Bill Woodfull as ‘heroic’
for containing the anger of the Australians and thought that his continued
batting after being struck in the chest was ‘the stuff that Empires were made
of’.4 The imperial crisis which was Bodyline resulted in part from a confluence
of circumstances beyond anyone’s control – Harold Larwood’s incredible
pace, Australian summertime wickets, tensions frayed by the Depression, the
growth of Australian nationalism, the emergence of the singular Bradman,
etc. – but it also was a product of the certainty possessed by all the actors
that their position was the morally sound and manly one. Jardine honestly
believed that Bodyline was indeed cricket and the Australians believed the
opposite. That, coupled with the heat of the moment, meant that comprom-
ise was not easily forthcoming.
The 1932/33 Ashes tour was not Jardine’s first. After a Test debut against
West Indies in 1928, Jardine toured Australia in 1928/29. His later troubles
there were clearly foreshadowed during this first antipodean campaign.
Fielding on the boundary for much of the time, Jardine was exposed at
close range to Australian crowds for whose boisterous nature he was unpre-
pared and ill-suited. With his aristocratic Harlequin cap and his intense
single-mindedness, he found favour with the Australian crowds only as an
object of their scorn. With the obvious exception of Bradman – who was
a national hero despite his less than outgoing personality – Australians
71
P A T R I C K F . Mc D E V I T T
preferred their cricketers to be jovial, gregarious and democratic. These

were three words that would not leap to mind when describing the dour
Scotsman. By the time his Harlequin cap had become an iconic emblem of
mutual hostility during Jardine’s second visit to Australia on the infamous
Bodyline Tour of 1932/33, Australian contempt for Jardine had reached
unprecedented levels. English bowler G. O. ‘Gubby’ Allen wrote in a letter
home to his parents from Australia, ‘Jardine is loathed and, between you
and me, rightly, more than any German who fought in any war’.5 Writing
half a decade after the tour, H. S. Altham and E. W. Swanton’s verdict on
the tour in their History of Cricket was that ‘the price paid for victory was
terribly heavy. Future generations may find it hard to imagine the resent-
ment evoked in Australia.’6 That Jardine reciprocated the crowds’ feelings
is undoubted.
The Australian summer of 1932/33 marked both the summit and nadir
of Jardine’s career. He accomplished the greatest goal of any English cricket
captain when he led his side to a 4–1 Ashes victory. But the uproar over the
tactics that brought about that victory left an indelibly dark mark on his
name ever after. It is fair to ask how this could come to pass. How did the
captain of the MCC team – an Oxford blue and county captain, leading a
distinguished group of English cricketers – reach the point that he endan-
gered relations with Britain’s closest dominion over the results of a game?
These were men for whom ‘cricket’ was a watchword for all that was right
and noble in their civilisation, and Jardine was as exemplary a specimen
of gentlemanly manhood as one could imagine. It was, after all, axiomatic
that it did not matter whether one won or lost, but how one played the
game. Even now, nearly eight decades later, it is still difficult to accept that
an English captain in his position would pursue a course of action that he
knowingly believed to be unsportsmanlike. The answer lies, I would argue,
in the fact that Jardine truly believed that his behaviour was sportsmanlike
and in the finest traditions of the game. The problem lay in the fact that
the game of cricket relied on both the laws of the game and the spirit of
the game to organise itself. As times changed, disputes over what consti-
tuted sportsmanship arose. No incident illustrates this more than Bodyline,
as the scandal that convulsed the world of international cricket during the
1932/33 Ashes campaign came to be known.
The controversy began when the Jardine-led tourists adopted new bowling
tactics against a formidable Australian team, particularly young Bradman.
O’Reilly argued that it was Bradman, like a ‘modern Napoleon … laying
waste their cricket grounds as he waged his brilliant 1930 batting cam-
paign’, that made Bodyline possible, even necessary from the perspective of
the English. He writes: ‘This had to be met with true British fighting spirit.’7
72
These new tactics, called ‘fast leg-theory’ by the English and ‘Bodyline bowl-
ing’ by journalists hoping to limit expensive international telegraph charges,
entailed short, fast balls bowled on the leg-side and often bouncing to chest
and head height, while surrounding the batsman with a ring of close fielders.
This was not just the attack used by Fred Root in the mid-1920s in England,
which employed inswingers on a good-ish length at fast-medium pace to
a packed leg-side field. With Larwood and Voce’s fantastic pace, bowling
short on the hard, dry Australian wickets with fielders encircling the bats-
man, this attack gave the batsman, in essence, no sporting chance, while at
the same time imperilling his health. In the third Test at Adelaide, which
was described by The Times as ‘the most disagreeable match that has been
played since the game began’,8 Australian wicketkeeper Bert Oldfield suf-
fered a broken skull when he was struck in the head with a ball while facing
the English fast bowlers, albeit not against Bodyline. To add insult to injury,
Jardine switched to a Bodyline field placement immediately after Woodfull
was ‘struck over the heart’, which infuriated the Australian spectators. Trying
to placate an enraged public, the Australian cricket authorities cabled their
English counterparts and decried the tactics as unsportsmanlike – the grav-
est charge one could level in the world of imperial sport – and threatening
to the heretofore good relations between dominion and mother country. The
English, seeing little choice but to defend their captain and team, refused to
accept the charge of unsportsmanlike behaviour and, in return, levelled per-
haps the second gravest charge possible at the Australians: they compared
the Australians to women.9 Larwood, the English bowler at the centre of
the controversy, argued, ‘If certain critics had not made such an effeminate
outcry about it during and after the third Test the whole bother would be
too childishly ludicrous to merit further consideration by grown-up men.’10
In a line of argument that was typical of the general English tone of report-
ing, one columnist asked: ‘Would they have us believe that the manly game
of cricket must, to suit their taste, be mutilated to be fit for eunuchs, not
men?’11
While the English tour of the southern dominion would conclude under
an uneasy truce, English commentators continued to insist that the tactics
were fair and sporting. A change of heart would come about only when a
West Indian cricket team came to the British Isles in the northern summer of
1933 and employed these same tactics against the English at home, where
they could witness them for themselves. Even the watered-down West Indian
version of Bodyline, rendered much less intimidating by the heavier atmos-
phere and damper wickets of England, which lessened the danger posed by
fast bowlers Learie Constantine and E. A. Martindale, was enough to lead
to the banning of the practice, although not an apology, by the English.12
73
The controversy is important for historians because it produced volumin-

ous commentary that strayed from the technicalities and clichés of everyday
cricket reporting and instead revealed why the game was important to the
societies that played it. In this commentary, we see that the game was a vital
way in which hierarchies of gender, race and nationality were maintained
and/or challenged and national visions of true manhood could be promul-
gated. Race, gender and class all contributed to the importance attached to
this contest and for men in the empire – West Indian, Briton and Australian
alike – defending their definition of cricket became equated with defending
their very manhood, especially as the hold of the Great Depression seemed
to squeeze ever tighter and national morale was low.13
For imperial Britain, cricket was more than just a game; it was a code
of conduct and the expression of a British and imperial sense of right and
wrong. The common usage of the phrase that something was ‘not cricket’
meant simply and succinctly that it was not morally right. It was a game in
which how one played mattered more than the outcome. In a letter to The
Times about the kerfuffle, the author A. A. Milne called for calm heads to
consider the English tactics since the ‘bitter feeling already aroused by the
colour of Mr. Jardine’s cap has been so intensified by the direction of Mr.
Larwood’s bowling as to impair friendly relations between England and
Australia’.14 A letter to the editor of the Morning Post stated that regardless
of whether the English are right or wrong about the appropriateness of the
tactics, ‘If one side or another thinks that the tactics of its opponents are
“not cricket” in any sense of the word, that should be quite sufficient for
those tactics to be dropped. After all, cricket is a game, and while it remains
a game it does not matter who wins.’15 Even at the time, in the midst of the
matches, the speedy unravelling of so much cricket tradition seemed unintel-
ligible to observers and participants alike. Bradman bemoaned how, by the
middle of the tour, ‘players of both sides got to passing each other without
a word of greeting’; he lamented, ‘Oh, that cricket should ever have got to
that.’16
So it was doubly shocking when the bad blood emerged on a cricket tour
between England and her closest dominion, Australia. Cricket tours were
meant to celebrate common values and cement imperial fellowship, but in
1933 the game revealed very deep divisions instead. At the root of the issue
was whether it was unmanly to employ this tactic (the Australian position)
or whether it was unmanly to complain about it rather than simply facing
it and taking whatever lumps might come one’s way (the English and West
Indian position). Larwood wrote that any attempt to curtail Bodyline bowl-
ing would ‘make of cricket a less manly game. That would be an Imperial
disaster.’17 However, from the perspective of history, it is clear that the true
74
imperial disaster from the point of view of the English was not that the
game would become less manly, but that the English claim to be the arbiters
of both civilisation and manliness would be challenged. An article in the
Australian Cricketer that was reprinted in the Barbados Advocate makes
this argument explicit by stating: ‘Australia, by practically claiming the
right to make laws, automatically ranked herself as equal first in cricketing
nations.’18
The ruling ethos of cricket, and indeed all imperial sport, was that games
provided an arena for a fair contest under pre-set rules to determine which
side was better at that moment, at that game. Essential to this vision of sport
was that the game was fairly and honestly played. The English language is
littered with expressions that use sport as a metaphor for justness: ‘level
playing fields’ imply an equality of opportunity for everyone, ‘to play with a
straight bat’ is to be honest and trustworthy, etc. However, being better in a
particular moment in a particular contest quickly became a synecdoche for
being the better man overall. This, however, became more complicated as
colonies and dominions challenged British superiority. Two quotations from
C. L. R. James’s autobiographical cricket book Beyond a Boundary sum
up the basic tensions between English sporting ideology and conceptions
of race and gender in the empire. The first highlights the disparity between
the ideals of sports and the realities; he wrote: ‘The British tradition soaked
deep into me was that when you entered the sporting arena you left behind
you the sordid compromises of everyday existence. Yet for us to do that
we would have had to divest ourselves of our skins.’19 Likewise, he demon-
strated the intimate connection between games, conceptions of masculinity
and power when he stated: ‘I knew we were man for man as good as any-
body. I had known that since my schooldays. But if that were the truth it was
not the whole truth.’20 It is important to remember that the basic ideals of
the game and its relationship to masculinity were shared by all three groups
in this controversy; what differed was the interpretation of how those ideals
would be played out in real life. For the British in general, and Jardine in
particular, by the time the fateful Ashes tour commenced, ‘may the best man
win’ became not an invocation of good luck to a competitor, but something
which needed to be confirmed by an English victory.
Although sportsmanship is often defined as a list of attributes and behav-
iours, Australian Test player Alan Kippax provided a more nuanced defin-
ition when he wrote: ‘Sportsmanship is not a strictly defined and absolute
code … It is, in fact, a convention, established by public opinion as a result
of experience.’21 Bodyline, while strictly within the laws of the game, seemed
to most Australians to be outside the spirit of the game. To the English, the
practice was well within the traditional bounds of acceptable play; people
75
had set close fielders before; people had bowled fast bumpers before; and
people had consistently attacked the leg-side before. For English commenta-
tors, there was nothing new in the attack except a sensationalist name cre-
ated by journalists hungry for increased circulation. The fact of the matter
is that both positions are valid. Intimidation by fast bowlers had long been
part of the tactical arsenal of every first-class cricketing team since over-
arm bowling was first legalised. However, the bowling attack devised and
employed by Jardine and implemented by Larwood and Bill Voce on the hard
wickets of Australia endangered the batsmen to an unprecedented level. The
resulting conundrum sent international cricket into a major crisis. The fact
that two prominent amateurs on the English side objected to the tactics as
unsporting illustrates that the tactic was far from universally accepted, even
among Jardine’s own men. Gubby Allen refused to bowl Bodyline and was
subsequently estranged from Jardine. Similarly, Muhammad Ibrahim Ali
Khan, the Nawab of Pataudi, refused to move from the off- to the leg-side
and take up a Bodyline fielding position, a refusal which prompted Jardine
to acidly observe: ‘I see His Highness is a conscientious objector today.’22
Pataudi was dropped despite having hit a century in the first Test at Sydney,
which England won by ten wickets.
The Australians, on the other hand, were nearly unanimous in their dis-
approval. As the tour progressed, the rhetoric surrounding the tactics grew
more and more heated. The Australian Worker, a Sydney newspaper with
the motto ‘An Australian Paper for Australian People’, declared that the
‘MCC will either have to denounce the basher gang methods which its team
has employed or forfeit the esteem in which it is held wherever the game of
cricket is played’.23 When E. T. Crutchley, the British government’s represen-
tative in Australia, met members of the Australian Board of Control to get
the charge of unsportsmanlike behaviour withdrawn, The Australian Worker
wondered: ‘Perhaps they are uneasily wondering if there is any possibility
of an incident resembling the historical tea raid in Boston Harbor prior to
the American War of Independence arising out of this cricket imbroglio.’24
Indeed, O’Reilly asserted in his memoirs: ‘I am as certain of it as of the cos-
mic fact that night follows day … that violence would have erupted mid-field
during that disgraceful season had it not been for the magnificent character
of the heroic William Maldon Woodfull … Woodfull knew, and through him
we knew, that we were being called upon to make a colossal sacrifice for the
good of the game.’25
The English defenders of the tactic claimed that the Australians had departed
(in a particularly unmanly way) from the traditions of the game by complain-
ing about an opponent’s tactic. It was largely unspoken, but the implication
was certainly that this was especially bad form if that opponent was the
76
MCC. Many English critics based their arguments on the premise that it is
inconceivable for the tactics to be unsportsmanlike simply because they have
been used by an English captain, which, in the minds of many English, by def-
inition made them fair. Larwood argued that if he were not a fair bowler then
MCC would not have selected him and his captain would not have continued
to play him.26 This, it would seem, brings us back to the central actor in the
Bodyline drama – Jardine. In the end, it was his decision to employ the tactics.
While well-off amateurs like Allen and the Nawab of Pataudi might have the
freedom to object, for the sons of Nottinghamshire coalminers like Larwood
and Voce, there was little choice but to implement the captain’s game plan as
instructed to the best of their abilities. Jardine’s worldview was that of the
high Victorian period, when the British ruled the waves and waived the rules.
Jardine’s expectations of behaviour fit squarely in a world in which colonial
subjects of the Crown deferred to Englishmen in matters of taste and culture,
including in cricket. The English way was, by definition, the proper and civi-
lised way, contradictions and hypocrisy be damned. Yet the world in which
the Bodyline tour occurred was a very different one. Three decades after fed-
eration, Australians saw their country as a full-grown man, not a child. And,
like a man who still loves his nagging mother, Australians held England in
great regard, but she was no longer an unquestioned authority. This was an
Australia that had come of age at Gallipoli, shortly before Britain was shaken
to its core at the Somme. Times had changed and neither Australian nor West
Indian acquiescence was forthcoming.
In a chapter with the perhaps overly dramatic title ‘Decline of the West’,
James contended that Bodyline was much more than simply a response
to Bradman’s batting or a moment of lost composure or poor judgement.
Rather, he argued:
Bodyline was not an incident, it was not an accident, it was not a temporary
aberration. It was the violence and ferocity of our age expressing itself in
cricket. The time was the early thirties, the period in which the contemporary
rejection of tradition, the contemporary disregard of means, the contemporary
callousness, were taking shape. The totalitarian dictatorships cultivated bru-
tality of set purpose … It began in World War I. Exhaustion and a fictitious
prosperity in the late twenties delayed its maturity. It came into its own in
1929. Cricket could no more resist than the other organizations and values of
the nineteenth century were able to resist. That big cricket survived the initial
shock at all is a testimony to its inherent decency and the deep roots it had
sunk.27
Although, generally speaking, one disagrees at one’s own peril and usu-
ally to one’s detriment with James’s position on the cultural significance of
cricket, I think that James is mostly mistaken here. James was arguing that
77
Bodyline was part and parcel of the age of nascent fascism and Stalinism on
the one hand, and of industrialised, mechanical, Taylorist efficiency, on the
other. And perhaps it was in part those things. However, I believe it would
be more accurate to see Bodyline less as the modern world asserting itself,
than as a clash of Jardine’s insistent Victorian masculinism with a mod-
ern world for which it was no longer suited. James believed that ‘modern
society took a turn downwards in 1929 and “It isn’t cricket” is one of the
causalities’.28 However, it is not James’s view of the 1930s that is too harsh,
but his view of Victorian culture that is too rosy. W. G. Grace may have
been the most emblematic and popular figure of the age, but the Victorian
period is not best understood in terms of good sportsmanship, white flan-
nel and afternoon tea. Rather, I would argue that the response to the Indian
Rebellion of 1857 is the truer face of England and the British Empire in the
age of Victoria. Decorum, noble values and attention to good form ruled the
day until they were insufficient to maintain British hegemony, and then they
were replaced by a willing brutality that could be set alongside any act of
barbarism in the history of man.
Jardine’s actions make sense when considering them through the lens of
the high Victorian British masculinity that combined the ideals of sports-
manship with the concrete reality of British material superiority. This is not
dissimilar to the way that the Victorian belief in free trade remained dom-
inant as long as Britain’s industrial and imperial power made that ideology
profitable. This is not to suggest that these ideologies were insincerely held;
the fact that an ideology works in the self-interest of its proponents does not
necessarily render that belief insincere. It is not that Jardine did not believe
that the best man should win; it was simply that he could not believe that
the English side were not the best men.
To that end, it is worth exploring the nature of Jardine’s conception of
manliness, which would have encompassed his understanding of sports-
manship as well as imperial relations. There are two often-repeated stories
about Jardine that are used to explain his insistence on employing a dan-
gerous and unsportsmanlike bowling attack against the Australians. The
first is a remark made by the West Indian-born manager of the 1932/33
English team, Pelham Warner, who stated that ‘when [Jardine] sees a cricket
field with an Australian on it, he goes mad’.29 Although pithy, this is cer-
tainly an inadequate explanation of Jardine’s steadfast refusal to abandon
the controversial tactics. Whatever Jardine was, he was neither crazed nor
out of control due to an over-exuberance of emotion. His whole personal-
ity was methodical and calculating, and so was this decision. Cold-blooded
and ruthless he may well have been, but mad he was not. To be sure, Jardine
hated the behaviour of the Australian crowds as much as they detested
78
him. He wrote: ‘It is often suggested in Australia that … every free-born

Australian has an absolute and inalienable right to self-expression. Whether
one subscribes to this Article of Faith is not of much importance. My objec-
tion is limited to the hostility and lack of taste to which this self-assumed
licence gives rise.’30 ‘Taste’ is of course decided by its relative proximity to
middle-class English mores. Similarly, in what seems like a pure case of the
pot calling the kettle black, Jardine wrote: ‘Australians, however, would do
well to remember sometimes that there are other standards of behaviour
besides their own, and that it is possible that there is much to be said in
favour of those other standards.’31 Nonetheless, playing the game the best
way he knew how was more important to Jardine than smoothing over the
ruffled feathers of his colonial opponents, much less the Australian masses
and press. In fact, according to Larwood, Jardine donned this multi-hued
hat just to annoy the Australian crowds.32
The second popular anecdote relates that, upon learning that MCC had
selected Jardine captain of England, an old schoolmaster of his at Winchester
is said to have remarked: ‘Well, we shall win the Ashes – but we may lose
a Dominion.’33 This is, I believe, a more accurate assessment of Jardine’s
motives. Over the course of the Victorian and Edwardian period, sport had
obviously come to be more than a pastime, especially for public school and
Oxbridge old boys. For many who excelled at games, athletic achievement
came to be an all-encompassing worldview, from which one could divine
an individual’s values and place in society. Modern sports were born in
the British public schools where male administrators sought to control the
energies (sexual and otherwise) of unruly boys; from that highly gendered
beginning, sports came to be bound up with the development and policing
of gender norms.34 Games not only displayed the proper attributes of man-
hood, but they actively instilled those traits that were deemed essential for
true manhood: physical strength, moral fortitude, discipline, co-operation
and subordination to a group at the expense of individualism. Being born
in an era of imperial expansion and dominance ensured that sport and its
attendant gendering would be incorporated into a nexus of colonial power
relations, both as a means to train and develop a ruling caste and in attempts
to ‘civilise’ the ‘uncivilised’ colonial subjects.35 In some cases – for example,
cricket in Australia – sport normally worked to unite imperial elites with
colonial subjects.36 In others, such as Gaelic football and hurling in Ireland
or baseball in the United States, sport worked to draw sharper distinc-
tions between groups.37 What is certain is the fact that, once modern sports
were introduced into a new context, the intentions of the original propo-
nents became nearly irrelevant, as the games and the meanings attached to
them took on lives of their own. Jardine’s stubborn insistence on his own
79
correctness reflects his fundamentally Victorian attitude towards imperial

sport, including the superiority of English manhood.
Connections between sport, gender and colonialism should be seen as
fundamentally hegemonic, but also fluid. Not only were some men ‘more
manly’ than other men, but manliness could be developed within an indi-
vidual or group. For the purposes of historians, this also implies that what it
meant to be a man – i.e. the attributes that would be seen as ideal and def-
initional – changed from time to time, place to place, class to class and race
to race. Consequently, ideal manhood for an aristocratic amateur English
cricketer, for example, was not necessarily the same as ideal manhood for a
middle-class Australian playing against him. It is still nonetheless true that
both would have seen the game as an integral way to instil, develop and per-
form manliness in line with their societies’ values. Yet the reception of games
by colonial subalterns was influenced as much by the preference and dictates
of colonial culture as it was by British attempts at cultural imperialism or
social control. The Australians had learned cricket from the English, but
how they played the game and the values they attached to various aspects
were products of their own culture, not English culture. One example of this
is when O’Reilly wrote that by the end of the campaign ‘Test cricket had lost
all appeal. Indeed I felt that I could not care less whether I ever turned out
again for Australia against England, and the thought occurred to me that it
was a matter of some serious discussion whether there were any Englishmen
worth playing against.’38 Clearly, the English were not the only ones using
the frame of masculinity to judge their opponents.
In his book Anti Body-Line, Australian Alan Kippax diplomatically wrote:
‘I don’t think any reasonable person, however partisan, has in cold blood
accused either bowler, or Jardine, of wishing to injure a batsman. Such a
suggestion is unthinkable; but I state without reservation that I believe that
the campaign was from the first one of intimidation, aimed in the first place
at Bradman and Woodfull, and, secondly, when it began to prove success-
ful, at all the recognized Australian batsmen.’39 Kippax took a long-sighted
view of the affair and argued that it is possible for two sportsmanlike parties
to disagree on whether a tactic is sportsmanlike or not. If, after a debate,
it is deemed unsportsmanlike, the original practitioners should not neces-
sarily be condemned. He wrote: ‘Occasionally there crops up in the arena
of sport something new, something which public opinion has not yet been
able to label.’40 In general, Australians saw themselves as the true guardians
of the shared imperial culture of sportsmanship, which had deteriorated in
England. For example, the president of the Victoria Cricket Association,
Cannon Hughes, stated: ‘Cricket is a game worth fighting for, and it is in
peril now. All of us should see that the grand old traditions are not broken
80
down.’41 Likewise, in discussing British defences of Bodyline, The Australian

Worker dryly noted: ‘Most comments contend that the ends justified the
means, a new code of ethics in regard to cricket.’42
Jardine and the English would have none of this. They steadfastly held
that the Australians were cowards and poor cricketers. Larwood explicitly
stated so: ‘You ask why Woodfull could not stand up to my fast leg-theory
bowling? These are the true reasons: Woodfull was too slow and Bradman
was too frightened. Yes frightened is the word. Bradman would just not have
it. He was scared of my bowling. I knew it as everybody did.’43 This is a view
that was shared, coincidentally, by Australian great Warwick ‘The Big Ship’
Armstrong, who covered the series for the London Evening News, and was
very critical of Bradman for using batting tactics against Bodyline which he
(Armstrong) thought were bred of fear.44 Jardine believed that ‘upon good
wickets if a good batsman is hit playing leg-theory he has no one to blame
but himself’.45 When one Australian writer pondered what Jardine would
have done if he had been hit in the head when such a leg-side attack had
been levelled against him, Jardine replied: ‘I should have said that it was a
case of poor batsmanship on my part and that the time had come when I
should very seriously consider the desirability of ceasing to play first-class
cricket owing to my obvious lack of skill.’46 While it may be easy to dismiss
this as pure bravado, it is not inconceivable that that indeed would have
been Jardine’s response. His belief in the stiff upper lip in that situation was
undoubtedly quite deeply and sincerely held. Nonetheless, Jardine’s ability
for self-criticism was limited.
Shortly after the conclusion of the Bodyline tour, Jardine published In
Quest of the Ashes as a defence of his behaviour. For Jardine, the blame
for the fiasco lay solely with the behaviour of the crowds, the press and
the Australian cricketing authorities. One suspects that Jardine would have
preferred a world without cricketing spectators, in which cricketers-cum-
knights could engage in chivalrous combat as they supposedly had in the
days of yore. For Jardine, it was the crowd – full of people made irrational
because of the bets they had placed on the matches – which transformed a
game into warfare, not the violent tactics ruthlessly employed by his team
and at his instruction. In the foreword to the 2005 edition of Jardine’s book,
former England captain and president of MCC Mike Brearley argued that
Jardine was completely unrepentant about his use of Bodyline. He wrote:
If the crowd had been demure, chivalry would never have been in question.
It looks rather as if the highwayman blames the darkness of the roads, or the
reactions of the public, for hold-ups. Perhaps part of Jardine’s extreme loath-
ing of the Australian public was down to their forcing him to examine (and
doubt) the truth of his own supposed ‘chivalry’.47
81
Jardine’s worldview could easily encompass accepting responsibility for a

weakness in his batsmanship while refusing responsibility for the reactions
of others to his captaincy. His sureness in his own propriety was absolute.
Brearley writes: ‘one imagines that, like Socrates, if he were found guilty
and invited to propose a penalty, he might well suggest being fed at the
city’s expense of the rest of his life.’48 Jardine knew that he had acted with
the highest sense of honour and the fact that most Australians and some of
his own countrymen disagreed with him was reflective of their inadequa-
cies, not his own. In fact, this disagreement was to be expected since it was
one of the main objects of international cricket to teach the subjects of the
empire how to behave. As MCC captain, Jardine was no more likely to feel
obligated to listen to the complaints of the Australian masses than a pub-
lic schoolmaster was obligated to listen to his pupils complain about their
workload.
While this posture had worked well enough (for the English) in earl-
ier decades, by the 1930s it was outdated. After the West Indies tour to
England in 1933 concluded, Bodyline was effectively banned by MCC.
Larwood never bowled in another Test match and Jardine’s captaincy
ended after leading MCC to India in 1934. In a way, then, Jardine was a
tragic figure out of time. If his captaincy had come earlier when England
was more self-assured and Australia less and before the modern telegraph
provided the illusion of instantaneous coverage, or later in a more aggres-
sive and well-padded age, perhaps Bodyline as we know it would not exist
at all. Jardine would simply be remembered as a hard-nosed and insight-
ful captain. However, to borrow from Marx, men make their own history
even if not in circumstances of their own choosing. Jardine may have been
unfortunate to play in the same era as Bradman at the height of his batting
powers and in an unsettled age as the empire was evolving into a common-
wealth. But play then he did, and the choices he made have left a legacy
which still fascinates decades later and extends far beyond the boundaries
of the cricket field.
NOT E S
1 ‘Douglas Jardine – Cricketer of the Year 1928’, Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack

1928 (London: John Wisden, 1928), www.cricinfo.com/wisdenalmanack/content/
story/154704.html (accessed 22 April 2010).
2 Christopher Douglas, Douglas Jardine: Spartan Cricketer (London: Methuen,
2002), p. 58.
3 ‘Douglas Jardine – Cricketer of the Year 1928’.
4 Bill O’Reilly, Tiger (Sydney: William Collins Pty Ltd, 1985), pp. 194–95.
5 Quoted in Mike Brearley’s foreword to D. R. Jardine, In Quest of the Ashes
(London: Methuen Publishing, 2005), p. xvi.
82
6 H. S. Altham and E. W. Swanton, A History of Cricket (London: George Allen

and Unwin Ltd, 1938), p. 337.
7 O’Reilly, Tiger, p. 74.
8 The Times, 24 January 1933.
9 See David Frith, Bodyline Autopsy: The Full Story of the Most Sensational
Test Cricket Series: England v Australia 1932–33 (London: Aurum, 2002); Ric
Sissons and Brian Stoddart, Cricket and Empire: The 1932–33 Bodyline Tour
of Australia (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984); Laurence Le Quesne,
The Bodyline Controversy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1983); R. Mason,
Ashes in the Mouth: The Story of the Bodyline Tour 1932–1933 (London:
Penguin, 1984); Brian Stoddart, ‘Cricket’s Imperial Crisis: The 1932–33 MCC
Tour of Australia’ in Richard Cashman and Michael McKernan (eds.), Sport
in History: The Making of Modern Sporting History (St Lucia: University of
Queensland Press, 1979); Edward Wyburgh Docker, Bradman and the Bodyline
Series (London: Angus & Robertson, 1983).
10 Harold Larwood, Body-line? (London: Elkin Matthews and Marrot, 1933),
p. 33.
11 ‘Is Cricket This?’, The Saturday Review, 21 January 1933.
12 Altham and Swanton, A History of Cricket, p. 363.
13 See Patrick F. McDevitt, May the Best Man Win: Sport, Masculinity and
Nationalism in Great Britain and the Empire, 1880–1935 (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004), pp. 81–137.
14 The Times, 20 January 1933.
15 Morning Post, 24 January 1933.
16 Donald Bradman, My Cricketing Life (London: Stanley Paul, 1938), p. 96.
17 Larwood, Body-line?, pp. 44–45.
18 Barbados Advocate, 2 August 1933.
19 C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993),
p. 66.
20 Ibid., p. 112.
21 Alan Kippax, Anti Body-Line (London: Hurst & Blackett Ltd, 1933), pp. 82–83,
86–87.
22 Gilbert Mant, A Cuckoo in the Bodyline Nest (Kenthurst, New South
Wales: Kangaroo Press, 1992), pp. 81, 111.
23 The Australian Worker, 18 January 1933.
24 The Australian Worker, 8 February 1933.
25 O’Reilly, Tiger, pp. 194–95.
26 Larwood, Body-line?, p. 20.
27 James, Beyond a Boundary, pp. 187–88.
28 Ibid., p. 192.
29 Le Quesne, The Bodyline Controversy, p. 34.
30 Jardine, In Quest of the Ashes, pp. 209–10.
31 Ibid., p. 198.
32 R. S. Whitington, Time of the Tiger: The Bill O’Reilly Story (London: Stanley
Paul, 1970), p. 187.
33 Stoddart, ‘Cricket’s Imperial Crisis’, p. 132.
34 Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1989); J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian
83
Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology

(Cambridge University Press, 1981).
35 J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion
of an Ideal (Cambridge University Press, 1981); Mangan, Pleasure, Profit,
Proselytism: British Culture and Sport at Home and Abroad 1700–1914
(London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1988); Hilary McD. Beckles and Brian Stoddart
(eds.), Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture (Manchester University
Press, 1995).
36 Wray Vamplew and Brian Stoddart (eds.), Sport in Australia: A Social History
(Cambridge University Press, 1994).
37 Mike Cronin, William Murphy and Paul Rouse, The Gaelic Athletic Association,
1884–2009 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009).
38 O’Reilly, Tiger, p. 99.
39 Kippax, Anti Body-Line, pp. 19–20.
40 Ibid., pp. 82–83, 86–87.
41 Sydney Morning Herald, 23 May 1933.
42 The Australian Worker, 5 July 1933.
43 Sydney Morning Herald, 8 May 1933.
44 Gideon Haigh, The Big Ship: Warwick Armstrong and the Making of Modern
Cricket (London: Aurum Press, 2003), pp. 395–98.
45 Jardine, In Quest of the Ashes, p. 73.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid., p. xi.
48 Ibid., p. x.
84

Bodyline Jardine and Masculinity

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5

Bodyline, Jardine and masculinity

understanding Jardine and his role in Bodyline. In 1932/33, Jardine’s vision

preferred their cricketers to be jovial, gregarious and democratic. These

The controversy is important for historians because it produced volumin-

him. He wrote: ‘It is often suggested in Australia that … every free-born

correctness reflects his fundamentally Victorian attitude towards imperial

down.’41 Likewise, in discussing British defences of Bodyline, The Australian

Jardine’s worldview could easily encompass accepting responsibility for a

1 ‘Douglas Jardine – Cricketer of the Year 1928’, Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack

6 H. S. Altham and E. W. Swanton, A History of Cricket (London: George Allen

Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology

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